Brand management system

Situation

The Client is an international full-service design and branding agency from Germany. The Client’s core expertise is building and implementing brand strategy for large enterprise companies across various industries including automotive, retail and logistics.

Driven by the desire to bring additional value to their customers even after their work is done, they’ve created the Brand Management System (BMS) product. The BMS increased their customers’ efficiency in managing brand-related materials and launching marketing communications across multiple offices in different countries.

The Client wanted to avoid diluting the company focus by building internal software engineering and product delivery departments. Therefore, since the very early version of the product, they decided to involve a delivery partner to support and further evolve the BMS. The search for the right development partner was not easy and did not work out from the first attempt. By the time The Client reached out to Unicsoft, the product’s roadmap was strongly delayed. On top of feature release delays, the existing customers were reporting a significant amount of bugs in their implementation.

Solution

Unicsoft agreed to take over the ownership of the product and continue the development of new features for the Brand Management System, onboarding new customers, and providing support to the existing ones.

We started our partnership with a legacy code review to let us know what issues it had and what we needed to improve in the product. The code review allowed us to identify primary points for improvement of the system: to retain the existing customer base and, at the same time, build a stable foundation for the new versions of the product.

After partially re-working and stabilizing the current version of the product, we were ready to start work on the version 2.0. It had an ambitious roadmap which included:

• A centralized media library for storing all brand identity elements including images, documents, and video materials;
• A content management module linked to media library. It eliminated the risk of releasing media communications with wrong or outdated identity elements;
• A content localization tool, which significantly simplified a coordinated launch of marketing communications in different languages across several countries. Such capabilities were facilitated by integration with the One2edit tool that allows localization of Adobe and InDesign documents online;
• Significantly improved user and permission management as well as powerful search across the content.

Result and Future Plans

During the first 2 years of partnership with The Client, Unicsoft was able to positively contribute to:

• Product positioning on the market
• Customer satisfaction
• Extending the product’s customer base.

Positioning: the aforementioned features of the  2.0 version of the product allowed to position it not only as a “CRM for brand identity”, but as a powerful marketing tool for international corporations and gain access to the whole new group of customers.

Customer satisfaction: the stability of the product significantly improved and now is in-line with enterprise customer’s expectations, resulting in high customer retention. High-quality and timely roll-out of the solution to new customers is crucial in extending BMS customer base. The onboarding heavily impacts the first impression, and it can only be made once. During our partnership, there was not a single case when a customer churned due to onboarding issues.

Unicsoft is proud of the positive impact we were able to make for The Client. Both Client and Unicsoft are expecting this partnership to last for a long time.